Just when the public is demanding, as never before, action to curb our gun violence epidemic, the Supreme Court does the opposite. Disallowing reasonable gun regulation for the sake of public safety. The court’s most insane decision ever.
It struck down New York’s century-old “Sullivan law,” requiring a showing of some particular need, for a permit to carry a gun in public. Thus making the Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms” practically absolute. Public safety be damned.
No right is ever unbounded. Your right to swing your fist proverbially stops at my nose. Ordinary citizens — the vast majority of us — have rights too. A right to live without fear of guns, and without being shot more than occasionally.
This is about men who fancy swaggering as tough guys packing heat. Supposedly to “protect themselves” by being able to shoot someone. But let’s be real, that’s a complete silly fantasy. Can you cite a single instance where anyone “protected” themselves against some miscreant by whipping out a gun and plugging them? It simply never happens.
What does happen — with tragic regularity — is those weapons injuring or killing those macho gun nuts themselves, or their family members or pals, or other innocent people.
Guns do not make anyone safer — least of all their owners. Instead, the more guns there are around, the less safe we all are; the more shooting there is.
This is real “American exceptionalism.” Not only with gun violence orders of magnitude greater than in any other country, but way more police shootings. Often killing innocents. That’s again because so many guns abound. So the police often face guns, but moreover there’s a very real fear that in any encounter they might face a gun. Making them tragically trigger-happy.
This the Supreme Court’s insane ruling exacerbates. Putting more guns on the streets. And for what? For men’s moronic juvenile fantasies of shooting bad guys, which never actually happens in real life.
And even if you hallucinate that guns protect anyone, surely nobody needs a military style assault weapon whose only purpose is to kill a lot of people fast. Surely the founders who enacted the Second Amendment 231 years ago never imagined it covering such extreme modern weapons. Might as well allow howitzers. Yet so deep is America’s gun craziness that Congress can’t even agree, not to ban such weapons, but to prohibit their sale to kids under 21! Best we can get is some background checking, and good luck enforcing that.
The day after its gun decision, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade.* A big victory for “pro-lifers.” The juxtaposition between the two cases could not be more surreal. Pro-life? With tens of thousands of Americans killed annually by guns. And these people also prattle about “law and order” — when a key reason for so much violent crime is the ubiquity of guns. It makes my head explode.
And only days earlier, the rampaging high court also blew up the wall of separation between church and state. Forcing Maine taxpayers to subsidize religious indoctrination of school kids. As Justice Sotomayor’s dissent says, church-state separation is now unconstitutional. Indeed, three justices even say government neutrality toward religion isn’t required — it can actually favor religion.
It’s getting lonely and dispiriting in rationalityland.
* I previously wrote about that: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2021/12/19/supreme-court-follies-1-abortion/
